The Metamorphosis of the Western Soul

Humans want to get along and get ahead. And they will become whoever they need to be in order to do so.

By Will Storr

Mr. Storr is a journalist and novelist.

Aug. 24, 2018

Image

Visitors observing the shark tank at the New York Aquarium this month.CreditCreditGabriella Angotti-Jones/The New York Times

Between 1965 and 1985, the Western self was transformed. We turned from anti-materialistic, stick-it-to-the-Man hippies into greed-is-good yuppies. We would be surprised if an individual went through such an extreme metamorphosis. But an entire culture did. What could have caused such a dramatic shift?

While the origins of such changes cannot be reduced to a single source, I believe we can point to a dominant one: the economy. In the early 1980s, President Ronald Reagan and the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher rewrote the rules by which we had once lived. And that, with stunning rapidity, changed who we were.

Psychologists attest to the enormous power of environment over culture. Many focus on differences between the individualistic West and the collectivist East. The story goes something like this: The Western self was born in Greece, a pointillist realm of around 1,000 city-states, where the land was poor for farming. Getting by meant hustling — tanning hides, making olive oil, fishing. This individualistic economy created an individualist ideal of self. The Greeks sought singular fame and glory. They gave birth to the Olympics, that celebration of individual competition, and an astonishing era of democracy.

A special section of the Times’ philosophy series, The Stone, in which authors, artists, philosophers, scientists and entrepreneurs answer the question, “What does it mean to be human today?” Read the entire series, here.

Compare that with ancient China, an undulating landscape in which getting by meant being part of a large farming community. Survival depended on the group rather than the individual. For Confucius the “superior” person “does not boast,” preferring instead “the concealment of his virtue” — nothing like the glory-seeking Greek. A different landscape made a different kind of human with different values. One prioritized the individual, the other the group. One saw reality comprising individual objects, the other a web of forces.

Such cognitive differences have been found in the lab by the psychologist Richard Nisbett at the University of Michigan. The research conducted there showed that an Asian person looking at a video of a fish tank is likely to scan the entire scene, while a Westerner will tend to focus more narrowly on the dominant fish. Asked what they thought of that singular fish Westerners tended to identify it as the “leader” while Easterners felt sorry for it because it was not part of the group.

Cultural differences such as these run deep.

“It isn’t just that Easterners versus Westerners think about the world differently,”Nisbett told me. “They’re literally seeing a different world.”

Humans are born incomplete. The brain absorbs huge amounts of essential information throughout childhood and adolescence, which it uses to carry on building who we are. It’s as if the brain asks a single, vital question: Who do I have to be, in this place, to thrive? If it was a boastful hustler in ancient Greece and a humble team-player in ancient China, then who is it in the West today?

The answer is a neoliberal.

After the economic chaos of the 1970s, it was decided that the United States and Britain had become too collective. Previous decades had seen the introduction of the New Deal, which included the Social Security Act, strict regulations on banking and business, and the rising power of the unions. This collectively tilted economy sired a collectively tilted people: monkey-suited Corporation Man and his children, the hippies. For Mr. Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher, saving ourselves meant rediscovering our individualist roots.

They cut taxes and regulations; they battled unions; they shrunk the welfare state; they privatized assets and weakened the state’s safety nets. They pursued the neoliberal dream of globalization — one free market that covered the earth. As much of human life as possible was to become a competition of self versus self.

In 1981, Margaret Thatcher said, “What’s irritated me about the whole direction of politics in the last 30 years is that it’s always been toward the collectivist society.”

She then made a comment that bordered on the sinister. “Economics are the method: The object is to change the soul.” And that’s precisely what happened.

A 2010 study of 325 million American names by Jean Twenge of the University of San Diego and othersfound a sharp increase in parents giving their children uncommon names starting in 1983. Parents, suggested its authors, wanted them to “stand out and be a star.” The previous year “Jane Fonda’s Workout Video” appeared, selling over a million copies and heralding a fitness craze that’s still with us. The 1980s saw the rise of a self-esteem movement whose promoters promised that self-love would make America competitive again. We have been relatively narcissistic ever since. The individualist West had always been me-focused, but this was something new.Neoliberalism was a heightened form of individualism that brought great benefits and grave costs.

Today’s culture of selfies, influencers, side-hustles, the gig economy and the fetishization of entrepreneurs and C.E.O.s is all thoroughly neoliberal. And, for millions, the system has worked. Living standards have risen for many while global poverty has dropped by more than half, according to the World Bank. But inequality has increased, too. And the relentless focus on the individual, combined with an increasingly harsh economic environment for the ordinary person, has proved toxic for our mental health. We individualists are great at crediting ourselves for our victories, but we are just as good at blaming ourselves for failure. And today, exacerbated by the rise of social media, more and more of us are feeling like failures.

We call such sensitivity to signals of failure “perfectionism.” This mode of thinking is a predictor of self-harm, depression and suicide. A 2017 study by Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill of 40,000 students in the United States, Britain and Canada found that, between 1989 and 2016, the extent to which people felt they had to “display perfection to secure approval” had risen by a staggering 33 percent. An adult morbidity survey in England shows that between 2000 and 2014, the number of adults reporting self-harm more than doubled. In the United States rates of anxiety and depression in adolescents are rising. Despite widespread adoption of antidepressants since the 1980s, the United States’ suicide rate rose by 24 percent between 1999 and 2014, according to the C.D.C.

The global financial crisis in 2008 did not help. Interestingly, narcissism, which was increasing during the 1990s and 2000s, has reportedly started to fall. Although the reasons are murky, I wonder about the psychological aftermath of this economic shock.

Before 2008, it felt as if neoliberalism was basically working for most people. But since the crash, millions have come to see the system as broken. First there came the Occupy movement and then the identity politics of alt-left and alt-right. The feeling is, variously, that the system has been stitched-up by bankers and corporations or is hostile to women, people of color or the white working class.

We also have seen the neoliberal Hillary Clinton falter and the antiglobalist Donald Trump triumph. Britain’s Brexit was secured by antiglobalist arguments, while support for the anti-neoliberal left-winger Jeremy Corbyn surged. The perception of a broken, rigged economy has left us angry and increasingly tribal, which might explain this recent trend toward “us” over the narcissistic “me.” It might even help explain recent rises in the grim ramifications of perfectionism.

If this is correct, it’s yet more evidence that who we are is powerfully influenced by where we are. Humans want to get along and get ahead and will become whoever they need to be in order to do so. In the 21st century, those rules are no longer set by our physical landscape. Today, the deep and enormously powerful controlling force is the economy.